Great weekend

Paul and I undertook a 12-mile hike, with a 1700-foot overall climb, in Butano State Park. Our goal: to find the Abandoned Landing Field indicated on the map. We'd tried this a couple of years ago and not made it all the way, on account of not having brought any food with us. This time, we were all prepared with sandwiches, granola bars and plenty of water to get us there. And we made it all the way up to the landing field...the most disappointing landing field ever.

I guess I wasn't expecting a flat stretch of gravelly dirt with a radio shack on it. I think from looking at the map, which had an icon that looked like a long concrete slab with a center line painted on it, I erroneously started visualizing it as a concrete slab with a center line painted on it, teeming with the spirits of airplanes that had taken off and landed there, perhaps.

It was so anticlimactic when we got there that Paul wasn't convinced we had actually reached it. A guy came by on a mountain bike and we asked him if this was really the abandoned landing field. He assured us yes, that was it. How long had it been abandoned? 10 or 15 years. Was this really it? Yes. Furthermore, it was the same one that had been featured on Bay Area Backroads. It had been used for logging and ranger stuff and they had landed Piper Cubs there.

Thus underwhelmed, but very thoroughly exercised, we completed the hike and proceeded to Duarte's in Pescadero for dinner. There where the artichoke is a totemic vegetable, we went artichoke mad: chilled artichoke hearts, cream of artichoke soup, artichoke ravioli in pink sauce, and pie a la mode (not artichoke pie. even in Pescadero, apparently, they don't make that). We spent the night in a B&B, and now we're back, lavishing attention on cranky Murphy. :)